The woman doused in marsh noise.
The woman perked by salt.
The woman suspended over mussel shells,
sidewheeling her legs in the crab river.
The woman besieged
and beseeched.
The woman in a dream of flood tide,
resplendent in river shoes, cork-buoyant,
tilting her toes
at the top of July.
The woman as thigh mistress of the riverbank.
Clean as porcelain,
she floats like rice
with the hollow straw.
Woman eddying and green:
starfish-spiked, curdling,
hunched in salt marsh air.

Listen to Tom Daley read "Overpass:"

Overpass

After a photograph by James Nielsen
Agence France Presse, The New York Times
September 2, 2005

A matte and wary sunlight nurses the water glints
that seeped, then spilled from the knee of the breached levee.
Outboard propellers thrum wind
through the cornrowed head of a floating woman.

Her long-sleeved nightdress clothespins
her buoyant black body to the sun.
It stalls her drooping, stalls her from shattering
like a cold front at the floor of the flooded streets.
She wheels near a woman feeding

a dog yoked to the edge of a bridge. Wheels
unheard, unscented, neither derelict nor redeemed,
now tipping, now tilting face-down
in the toxic outwash of the Pontchartrain.
Arms outstretched, she gives her shoulder blades
and buttocks to heaven.

The woman’s lungs have looted the fruit of phantom tidal gates,
of marshes starved of the beneficence of silt.
Her shroud, cotton, filmy, shin-length,
wads the sights of marksmen and moguls.
She glints, a freshly-minted coinage,
tossed to land, tail-up, at the front of the flood.

Listen to Tom Daley read "Theology:"

Theology

Like a host of hollowed out ideograms
that once fattened on fallow weeks,
theology swarms the hemispheres of the skull.